It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. - Jerome K. Jerome

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Note that the term “under storage” is substituted for “under management.” Truth be told, data management in distributed computing environments is extraordinarily lax. The best analogy for distributed storage is a huge and growing junk drawer. This point is underscored by data collated by Sun Microsystems after performing nearly 10,000 storage assessments at client facilities. Per Sun’s statistics, for every hard disk deployed by a company, roughly 30 percent of its capacity contains useful data accessed regularly as part of day to day operations. Another 40 percent must be retained for reasons of historical value, regulatory or legal compliance, or because it is intellectual property. Rarely referenced, this data belongs in an archive, preferably tape or optical because they consume far less kilowatt hours than do disk-based systems.

This point is never brought up in the articles you read in the trades. Instead, vendors posit a number of hardware and software value-add solutions as silver bullets for Green IT. Virtualization, de-duplication, compression, re-driving arrays with larger disk drives, leveraging MAID (massive arrays of independent disk, a portion of which spin down when not in use), and thin provisioning are just a few of the green panaceas that are being discussed. Most involve plugging additional hardware into the wall, which is hardly an intelligent way to reduce power consumption.

All of these techniques deliver tactical value at best: unmanaged data will continue to grow over time and eliminate whatever short term power reductions that the new technologies deliver. They are simply re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Getting to green in IT ultimately and strategically comes down to managing data better. It costs a company virtually nothing to sort out their data junk drawer, to apply processes for classifying data so that it can be migrated over time into an archive, and to deploy storage resource management tools to spot wasted space, ownerless files and junk data in their repositories.